PSY 201: Psychology of the Organization

Overview

Organizations are complex entities, and can be puzzling and overwhelming to many of those who work within them. This course will better prepare you for your role within an organization from the individual level through the team level to the organizational level. With an emphasis on how you can make a difference in your organization’s effectiveness, we will examine the organization from a “systems” view, looking at the alignment of key organizational components necessary for effective organization performance. Organizational alignment is a critical element of organizational success. The driving forces of strategy, culture, and infrastructure must work in relative harmony to deliver needed results. Making decisions in your daily work considering organizational needs will help you in making positive contributions to that success, which ultimately can help your own career.

In the course project, you will determine the relative degree of organizational alignment for your own company, find a critical disconnect, and recommend a plan of action to reduce or resolve this organizational challenge.

Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Define and describe an organization through its purpose, structure, design, and mission while exploring its relationship to its external environment.
• Define an organization as a system with its commonly associated components and through alignment of driving forces that determine organizational success.
• Describe an organization’s culture through its vision, values, and behaviors.
• Describe stages of team formation, recognize team dynamics, and develop best personal practices for success in a team environment.
• Develop new approaches for routinely providing feedback to others in order to help overall organizational performance.
• Test personal assumptions about change, develop personal strategies for making positive contributions to change initiatives, and help implement change more effectively.
• Compare and contrast leadership behaviors, identify leadership qualities within you, and further develop your own leadership capabilities.
• Determine the relative degree of organizational alignment for your own company, find a critical disconnect, and recommend a plan of action to reduce or resolve this organizational challenge.

Required Texts
PSY 201 texts are available from the JIU/MBS bookstore